Contents
The word that hurts you without you noticing
Psychology
Self-impositions, based on the “shoulds” that we tell ourselves every day, prevent us from growing
After an endless and exhausting workday, you come home and fall exhausted on the couch. You start watching television, or looking at your mobile without much desire. After a couple of hours comes a feeling of guilt. “I should have gone to the gym” or “I should have been ironing” are phrases that go through your mind. You feel guilty for not having done it, because you have not fulfilled an obligation.
But … and who has decided that you had to do it? You have been yourself, imposing on yourself what you “should” do.
“What you have an obligation to do” is what the RAE says when you look up the word “duty” in the dictionary. An obligation that we decide ourselves, and that many times the only thing that does us is harm. «It is absurd because we are punishing without realizing it», Explains the psychologist Leocadio Martín, author of the book« Happiness: what helps and what doesn’t ».
The word ‘should’ encompasses many problems. Is a word that talk about the future and the past, and at the same time it is perhaps the word that takes us the most out of the present », points out the psychologist.
Identify the useless
Within his book, the professional talks about the existence of three “emotional spaces”: the useless, the instrumental and the important. The “shoulds” would be included in the first group and, as Martín explains, “they don’t give us anythingAnd yet they seem to have a spell on us that robs us of time and courage. For this reason, a feeling of guilt is born that is only sustained by our own self-impositions, obligations that are almost always empty and without foundation.
When we make use of everything “useless”, in this case those “shoulds” that we say to ourselves every day, what we do is promote a state of ” anxiety and depression and create a quasi-addictive phenomenon in which, despite enjoying what you do, you are unable to stop, “argues the psychologist in the book.
Know each other
And what can we do to avoid these self-impositions? Leocadio Martín gives two keys: first, he explains that “we have to love each other a lot, since we are little,” and also appeals to parents since they never threaten their children with “not loving them” as punishment; on the other hand, it says that a good exercise To practice is to “look at yourself through the eyes of the people who love you.” “It is something that surprises us, a good way to get to know ourselves,” says Leocadio Martín, and concludes: “In the end, everything is about accepting ourselves, getting to know ourselves, stopping trying to fit into a mold.”